Right to Roam? Nineteenth-Century Commons and Caroline Lesjak's The Afterlives of Enclosure

Abstract

It is August 2022, and I am sitting in the British Library completing a shamefully late review (this one) when I see the headline: “Trespassers Demand Right to Roam Minister's 12,000 Acre Estate.” One hundred fifty protesters led by activist Nadia Shaikh and complete with a Morris dancing troupe walked into the Englefield estate of Richard Benyon, the UK government minister responsible for access to nature, as part of a campaign around public access to land. Benyon's ancestral estate contains sizeable areas of former common land enclosed by his ancestor, also Richard Benyon, in 1802. Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, who was at the protest, added: Over the next twenty years [Richard Benyon] moved an entire village out of sight of Englefield house to make way for his deer park. Then, in 1854, a stopping order was granted by his friends in parliament to close the public road that ran in front of his house. Today the Ramblers’ “Don't Lose Your Way” website reveals a former footpath running through the estate, identifiable on old Ordnance Survey maps, but which has since been extinguished.Like many other activists over the past three hundred years or more, Shaikh organized a walking—and singing and dancing—resistance to the legal fact of enclosure that leaves only 8 percent of English land with free access. As Raymond Williams reminded readers in The Country and the City (1973), the “mathematical grids of enclosure awards, with their straight hedges and straight roads, are contemporary with the natural curves and scattering of the park scenery.”